It's been three years in the making, cost $3.5 million and will last a total of three seconds, and it's set to take-off within the next few days.

A team of scientists from the University of Queensland have spent the last week at Andoya Rocket Range, 300km north of the Arctic Circle in Norway, preparing to launch the hypersonic scramjet into space.

Weather permitting, the spacecraft, powered by a two-stage rocket, will boost the scramjet to an altitude of 320km, at which point the scramjet will separate, returning to earth.

Scramspace director and chair for hypersonics at UQ Professor Russell Boyce says they are ready to kick off the launch campaign in earnest.

"The flight is about 10 minutes but the actual experiment is about three seconds," says Professor Boyce.

"It doesn't sound like much time, but actually at the speed that this scramjet will be travelling, about 8,500km per hour, that's something like 3,000 or more body lengths of flow going through the scramjet, and that's plenty of test time.

"When we test in the shock tunnel at the University of Queensland, we only get about three milliseconds of test time and even that's enough."

Professor Boyce says after an intense week preparing for the launch, Monday's full rehearsal was quite successful.

"A scramjet is a very, very simple jet engine; it's not a rocket, in fact it's not rocket science.

"It's an engine that breaths air in the front, just like the engine that you hang underneath the wing of an aircraft.

"It's got no moving parts though, so if you're travelling fast, shock waves compress the air and it gets nice and hot, high pressure and you mix in some fuel and it burns and blasts out the back."

Professor Boyce says the project will ultimately test everything from high-temperature materials that could change the face of manufacturing industries to the viability of putting satellites into space for around half the cost.

"We have a vision... it's possible that we might even be able to put satellites into space for half the cost."

The project, which was established with funding by the Australian Space Research Program, is also developing technologies which have applications outside of the aerospace industry.

"On the flight experiment there are some high-temperature materials, some ultra-high temperature ceramic materials being tested. These are useful for not just for high speed flight, but for high temperature manufacturing," Professor Boyce says.

You can follow all the preparation and action of the launch of Scramscape 1 on the Facebook page or on Twitter.